Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarchist communism, Marxist schools of thought, and religious communism, among others. Communism encompasses a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism, as well as the political ideologies grouped around those. All of these different ideologies generally share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system, and mode of production, that in this system there are two major social classes, that the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution. The two classes are the proletariat, who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor power to survive, and the bourgeoisie, a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and in turn establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a communist mode of production.
Communism in its modern form grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe that argued capitalism caused the misery of urban factory workers. In the 20th century, several ostensibly Communist governments espousing Marxism–Leninism and its variants came into power, first in the Soviet Union with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after World War II. As one of the many types of socialism, communism became the dominant political tendency, along with social democracy, within the international socialist movement by the early 1920s. (Full article...)
The Workers' Party (Arabic: حزب العمال), formerly the Tunisian Workers' Communist Party (Arabic: حزب العمال الشيوعي التونسي, Ḥizb al-‘Ummāl ash-Shuyū‘ī at-Tūnisī ; French: Parti communiste des ouvriers de Tunisie, PCOT), is a Marxist-Leninistpolitical party in Tunisia. Its general secretary is Hamma Hammami. After their involvement in the uprising against Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, PCOT held their first conference as a legal party on July 22–24, with up to 2000 persons attending.
In the 2011 Constituent Assembly election, the candidates of PCOT's electoral formation ran by the name "Revolutionary Alternative" (Arabic: البديل الثوريal-badīl ath-thawrī; French: Alternative révolutionaire) and won 3 of the 217 seats, in Sfax, Kairouan and Siliana. In July 2012, the PCOT decided to remove the word "communist" from its name to avoid the stereotype associated with this term.
Edward Gierek (Polish pronunciation:[ˈɛdvartˈɡʲɛrɛk]; 6 January 1913 – 29 July 2001) was a Polish communist politician. Gierek was born in Porąbka, outside of Sosnowiec. He lost his father to a mining accident in a pit at the age of four. His mother married again and emigrated to northern France, where he was raised. He joined the French Communist Party in 1931 and was later deported to Poland for organizing a strike. After his military service in Stryj, Galicia, Gierek went to Belgium in 1934, where he joined the Communist Party of Belgium while working in the coal mines of Waterschei. During World War II, he remained activist of the Communist Party of Belgium. He returned to Poland in 1948 and rose through the party ranks to become by 1957 a member of the Polish parliament. As first secretary of the Katowicevoivodship party organization (1957–70), Gierek created a personal power base and became the recognized leader of the young technocrat faction of the party. When rioting over economic conditions broke out in late 1970, Gierek replaced Władysław Gomułka as party first secretary. Gierek promised economic reform and instituted a program to modernize industry and increase the availability of consumer goods, doing so mostly through foreign loans. His good relations with Western politicians, especially France's Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and West Germany's Helmut Schmidt, were a catalyst for his receiving Western aid and loans.
...that Moscow City Hall, built in the 1890s to the tastes of the Russian bourgeoisie, was converted by Communists into the Central Lenin Museum after its rich interior decoration had been plastered over.
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No one can possibly deny that the education of Soviet children, too, is propaganda. The only difference is that in bourgeois countries it is a question of injecting into the child respect for old institutions and ideas which are taken for granted. In the USSR it is a question of new ideas, and therefore the propaganda leaps to the eye. “Propaganda,” in the evil sense of the word, is the name that people usually give to the defense and spread of such ideas as do not please them.
In times of conservatism and stability the daily propaganda is not noticeable. In times of revolution, propaganda necessarily takes on a belligerent and aggressive character. When I returned to Moscow from Canada with my family early in May, 1917, my two boys studied at a “gymnasium” (roughly, high school) which was attended by the children of many politicians, including some ministers of the provisional government. In the whole gymnasium there were only two Bolsheviks, my sons, and a third sympathizer. In spite of the official rule, “the school must be free of politics,” my son barely twelve years old was unmercifully beaten up as a Bolshevik. After I was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, my son was never called anything but Chairman and received a double beating. That was propaganda against Bolshevism.
Those parents and teachers who are devoted to the old society cry out against “propaganda.” If a state is to build a new society, can it do otherwise than begin with the school?
